From Printz Honor medal winner and National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti comes a fresh and luminous novel “about love and loss, mental illness, and taking charge of one’s own fate” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

There are many ways to be lost.

Sometimes people want to be lost. Madison—Mads to everyone who knows her—is trying her best to escape herself during one last summer away from a mother who needs more from her than she can give, and from a future that has been decided by everyone but her.

Sometimes the lost do the unimaginable, like the woman—the body—Mads collides with in the middle of the water on a traumatic morning that changes everything. And sometimes the lost are the ones left behind, like the son of the woman in the water, Billy Youngwolf Floyd.

Billy is struggling to find his way through each day in the shadow of grief. His one comfort is the map he carries in his pocket, out of his favorite book The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. When three lives (and one special, shared book) collide, strange things happen. Things like questions and coincidences and secrets, lots of secrets. Things like falling in love. But can two lost people telling so many lies find their way through tragedy to each other…and to solid ground?

Essential Maps for the Lost: Map Love

I’ve always been drawn to maps.  When I was a child, one of my favorites was set inside the center of The Pirate’s of the Caribbean, a souvenir book that we’d gotten on our trip to Disneyland.  The map featured the watery pathway of the ride, with a big skull and crossbones splashed at its center.  I’d trace my finger along the route, replaying my thrilling time there: the creepy, blue-tinged lagoon where we first got in; the sight of the first skeleton in the bed surrounded by gold; and the worst, most terrifying moment of all, when the ride got stuck and our boat was frozen under a barrel of dynamite by the pirate ship.  I was convinced it was all over then – I was truly scared, and exhilarated, too.  But more than anything I was immersed in the story, and the map allowed me to become immersed again.

And then came maps in books:  Winnie the Pooh, and The Wizard of Oz, which, in our edition, came with a pop-up Emerald City castle and a pair of green-tinted glasses to make the tale even more psychedelic.  There was the map in The Phantom Tollbooth, too, with the Sea of Knowledge (yes, please), the Mountains of Ignorance (no, thank you), the oh-so-intriguing “Doldrums” (until you grow up and learn what they are), and the Foothills of Confusion (which you grow up and spend some time in).

There were the maps in my most favorite books of all: The Chronicles of Narnia.  The scrolls and fonts on these maps declared ADVENTURE, and each came with an elaborate compass rose.  Can we just pause for a moment and take in that beautiful and beguiling phrase, compass rose?  Sigh…  Those Narnia maps called out to the secret swashbuckler I had inside, the one who wanted to board a ship and ride the back of a lion and follow a white stag in the snow, with my dagger and my ivory horn at my hip.  Most favorite was the map inside The Dawn Treader, as I was clearly partial to maps with ships.  On it, you could find Cair Paravel, which sounded as delicious as a whipped dessert, and The Great Eastern Ocean, which needed a conquering and a crossing in my imagination.  At the center of that map is a tiny voyaging sailboat, too, and the words About here they joined the ship.  Seeing it now I feel the same eager urge to go, the same delight, and the same strange, welcome relief of disappearing into that other world.

And then there was THAT map, the one that plays such an important role in my newest novel, Essential Maps for the Lost, the map in the center of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Like Billy Youngwolf Floyd, I hid inside that map which hid inside that book.  As a young reader, I lost myself in all the hallways and rooms, Arms and Armor, European Paintings, Dutch and Flemish 17th Century.  Like Mads, I could almost hear the tap of my own heels on the floor.  The American Wing.  Art of India.   I felt the cool hush of history, the secret tales of jeweled swords and necklaces in the shape of tigers and oil paint so real that you’re sure a king’s eyes follow you.

Like Mads and Billy, I was filled with the longing to be there, in that museum.  And here is the beauty of maps in books: a map can make you want things, and a book can open a door, and a map plus a book, a map within a book, is a double prize – a hiding place within a hiding place, a door within a door.  Books offer the magic power of escape and the magic power of understanding, and so do maps.  Together, you have two ways to explore new lands that might help you understand the baffling one you’re actually in, and two ways to escape from it for a while.   With a book and a map, you can discover a clearer path… or a different road altogether.